The Twenty-One Clues Read online

  In newspaper reviews both Dorothy L. Sayers and ‘Francis Iles’ (crime novelist Anthony Berkeley Cox) highly praised this latest mystery by ‘The Clever Mr Connington’, as he was now dubbed on book jackets by his new English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Sayers particularly noted the effective characterisation in The Ha-Ha Case: ‘There is no need to say that Mr Connington has given us a sound and interesting plot, very carefully and ingeniously worked out. In addition, there are the three portraits of the three brothers, cleverly and rather subtly characterised, of the [governess], and of Inspector Hinton, whose admirable qualities are counteracted by that besetting sin of the man who has made his own way: a jealousy of delegating responsibility.’ The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement detected signs that the sardonic Sir Clinton Driffield had begun mellowing with age: ‘Those who have never really liked Sir Clinton’s perhaps excessively soldierly manner will be surprised to find that he makes his discovery not only by the pure light of intelligence, but partly as a reward for amiability and tact, qualities in which the Inspector [Hinton] was strikingly deficient.’ This is true enough, although the classic Sir Clinton emerges a number of times in the novel, as in his subtly sarcastic recurrent backhanded praise of Inspector Hinton: ‘He writes a first class report.’

  Clinton Driffield returned the next year in the detective novel In Whose Dim Shadow (1935), a tale set in a recently erected English suburb, the denizens of which seem to have committed an impressive number of indiscretions, including sexual ones. The intriguing title of the British edition of the novel is drawn from a poem by the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘Those trees in whose dim shadow/The ghastly priest doth reign/The priest who slew the slayer/And shall himself be slain.’ Stewart’s puzzle plot in In Whose Dim Shadow is well clued and compelling, the kicker of a closing paragraph is a classic of its kind and, additionally, the author paints some excellent character portraits. I fully concur with the Sunday Times’ assessment of the tale: ‘Quiet domestic murder, full of the neatest detective points [. . .] These are not the detective’s stock figures, but fully realised human beings.’7

  Uncharacteristically for Stewart, nearly twenty months elapsed between the publication of In Whose Dim Shadow and his next book, A Minor Operation (1937). The reason for the author’s delay in production was the onset in 1935–36 of the afflictions of cataracts and heart disease (Stewart ultimately succumbed to heart disease in 1947). Despite these grave health complications, Stewart in late 1936 was able to complete A Minor Operation, a first-rate Clinton Driffield story of murder and a most baffling disappearance. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer found that A Minor Operation treated the reader ‘to exactly the right mixture of mystification and clue’ and that, in addition to its impressive construction, the novel boasted ‘character-drawing above the average’ for a detective novel.

  Alfred Stewart’s final eight mysteries, which appeared between 1938 and 1947, the year of the author’s death, are, on the whole, a somewhat weaker group of tales than the sixteen that appeared between 1926 and 1937, yet they are not without interest. In 1938 Stewart for the last time managed to publish two detective novels, Truth Comes Limping and For Murder Will Speak (also published as Murder Will Speak). The latter tale is much the superior of the two, having an interesting suburban setting and a bevy of female characters found to have motives when a contemptible philandering businessman meets with foul play. Sexual neurosis plays a major role in For Murder Will Speak, the ever-thorough Stewart obviously having made a study of the subject when writing the novel. The somewhat squeamish reviewer for Scribner’s Magazine considered the subject matter of For Murder Will Speak ‘rather unsavoury at times’, yet this individual conceded that the novel nevertheless made ‘first-class reading for those who enjoy a good puzzle intricately worked out’. ‘Judge Lynch’ in the Saturday Review apparently had no such moral reservations about the latest Clinton Driffield murder case, avowing simply of the novel: ‘They don’t come any better’.

  Over the next couple of years Stewart again sent Sir Clinton Driffield temporarily packing, replacing him with a new series detective, a brash radio personality named Mark Brand, in The Counsellor (1939) and The Four Defences (1940). The better of these two novels is The Four Defences, which Stewart based on another notorious British true-crime case, the Alfred Rouse blazing-car murder. (Rouse is believed to have fabricated his death by murdering an unknown man, placing the dead man’s body in his car and setting the car on fire, in the hope that the murdered man’s body would be taken for his.) Though admittedly a thinly characterised academic exercise in ratiocination, Stewart’s Four Defences surely is also one of the most complexly plotted Golden Age detective novels and should delight devotees of classical detection. Taking the Rouse blazing-car affair as his theme, Stewart composes from it a stunning set of diabolically ingenious criminal variations. ‘This is in the cold-blooded category which [. . .] excites a crossword puzzle kind of interest,’ the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement acutely noted of the novel. ‘Nothing in the Rouse case would prepare you for these complications upon complications [. . .] What they prove is that Mr Connington has the power of penetrating into the puzzle-corner of the brain. He leaves it dazedly wondering whether in the records of actual crime there can be any dark deed to equal this in its planned convolutions.’

  Sir Clinton Driffield returned to action in the remaining four detective novels in the Connington oeuvre, The Twenty-One Clues (1941), No Past is Dead (1942), Jack-in-the-Box (1944) and Commonsense is All You Need (1947), all of which were written as Stewart’s heart disease steadily worsened and reflect to some extent his diminishing physical and mental energy. Although The Twenty-One Clues was inspired by the notorious Hall-Mills double murder case – probably the most publicised murder case in the United States in the 1920s – and the American critic and novelist Anthony Boucher commended Jack-in-the-Box, I believe the best of these later mysteries is No Past Is Dead, which Stewart partly based on a bizarre French true-crime affair, the 1891 Achet-Lepine murder case.8 Besides providing an interesting background for the tale, the ailing author managed some virtuoso plot twists, of the sort most associated today with that ingenious Golden Age Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.

  What Stewart with characteristic bluntness referred to as ‘my complete crack-up’ forced his retirement from Queen’s University in 1944. ‘I am afraid,’ Stewart wrote a friend, the chemist and forensic scientist F. Gerald Tryhorn, in August 1946, eleven months before his death, ‘that I shall never be much use again. Very stupidly, I tried for a session to combine a full course of lecturing with angina pectoris; and ended up by establishing that the two are immiscible.’ He added that since retiring in 1944, he had been physically ‘limited to my house, since even a fifty-yard crawl brings on the usual cramps’. Stewart completed his essay collection and a final novel before he died at his study desk in his Belfast home on 1 July 1947, at the age of sixty-six. When death came to the author he was busy at work, writing.

  More than six decades after Alfred Walter Stewart’s death, his J. J. Connington fiction is again available to a wider audience of classic-mystery fans, rather than strictly limited to a select company of rare-book collectors with deep pockets. This is fitting for an individual who was one of the finest writers of British genre fiction between the two world wars. ‘Heaven forfend that you should imagine I take myself for anything out of the common in the tec yarn stuff,’ Stewart once self-deprecatingly declared in a letter to Rupert Gould. Yet, as contemporary critics recognised, as a writer of detective and science fiction Stewart indeed was something out of the common. Now more modern readers can find this out for themselves. They have much good sleuthing in store.

  1 For more on Street, Crofts and particularly Stewart, see Curtis Evans, Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). On the academic career of Al
fred Walter Stewart, see his entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 52, 627–628.

  2 The Gould–Stewart correspondence is discussed in considerable detail in Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery. For more on the life of the fascinating Rupert Thomas Gould, see Jonathan Betts, Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R. T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Longitude, the 2000 British film adaptation of Dava Sobel’s book Longitude:The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Harper Collins, 1995), which details Gould’s restoration of the marine chronometers built by in the eighteenth century by the clockmaker John Harrison.

  3 Potential purchasers of Murder in the Maze should keep in mind that $2 in 1927 is worth over $26 today.

  4 In a 1920 article in The Strand Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed as real prank photographs of purported fairies taken by two English girls in the garden of a house in the village of Cottingley. In the aftermath of the Great War Doyle had become a fervent believer in Spiritualism and other paranormal phenomena. Especially embarrassing to Doyle’s admirers today, he also published The Coming of the Faeries (1922), wherein he argued that these mystical creatures genuinely existed. ‘When the spirits came in, the common sense oozed out,’ Stewart once wrote bluntly to his friend Rupert Gould of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like Gould, however, Stewart had an intense interest in the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, believing that he, his wife and daughter had sighted a large marine creature of some sort in Loch Ness in 1935. A year earlier Gould had authored The Loch Ness Monster and Others, and it was this book that led Stewart, after he made his ‘Nessie’ sighting, to initiate correspondence with Gould.

  5 A tontine is a financial arrangement wherein shareowners in a common fund receive annuities that increase in value with the death of each participant, with the entire amount of the fund going to the last survivor. The impetus that the tontine provided to the deadly creative imaginations of Golden Age mystery writers should be sufficiently obvious.

  6 At Ardlamont, a large country estate in Argyll, Cecil Hambrough died from a gunshot wound while hunting. Cecil’s tutor, Alfred John Monson, and another man, both of whom were out hunting with Cecil, claimed that Cecil had accidentally shot himself, but Monson was arrested and tried for Cecil’s murder. The verdict delivered was ‘not proven’, but Monson was then – and is today – considered almost certain to have been guilty of the murder. On the Ardlamont case, see William Roughead, Classic Crimes (1951; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2000), 378–464.

  7 For the genesis of the title, see Macaulay’s ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus,’ from his narrative poem collection Lays of Ancient Rome. In this poem Macaulay alludes to the ancient cult of Diana Nemorensis, which elevated its priests through trial by combat. Study of the practices of the Diana Nemorensis cult influenced Sir James George Frazer’s cultural interpretation of religion in his most renowned work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. As with Tom Tiddler’s Island and The Ha-Ha Case the title In Whose Dim Shadow proved too esoteric for Connington’s American publishers, Little, Brown and Co., who altered it to the more prosaic The Tau Cross Mystery.

  8 Stewart analysed the Achet-Lepine case in detail in ‘The Mystery of Chantelle’, one of the best essays in his 1947 collection Alias J. J. Connington.

  Chapter One

  The Alvington Divorce Case

  AT eighty-seven, Mrs. Victoria Alvington was beginning to break up. After a long life of robust health, during which she had ruled her children and grandchild with unsparing severity, she was taking her decline badly; and it was only after prolonged argument that her son Arthur had been allowed to call in a specialist to report upon her symptoms. The result of the consultation that afternoon had not been wholly satisfactory from Arthur’s point of view. He had put one or two questions to Dr. Dungarvan which had surprised the physician, who was unaware that Mrs. Alvington ruled more by the power of the purse than by any filial affection in her family.

  After he had got Dr. Dungarvan off his hands, Arthur Alvington rang up his niece Helen to give her the specialist’s verdict. Her husband, the Rev. John Barratt, answered the phone and intimated, not too courteously, that Mrs. Barratt was going that evening to a meeting in the hall of the Church of Awakened Israel, and would thus not be home until half-past nine.

  Arthur Alvington was a little surprised. In the first years of her married life, Helen had taken a keen interest in church work; but this had died down, and now it was only when Barratt insisted on her attendance that she ever went near such functions. Some of the congregation were deeply offended by this laxity, Arthur knew; but he himself rather sympathised with it, having little enthusiasm for such affairs. Besides, as he recognised, Helen was a fish out of water amongst the congregation, most of whom were decent lower-middle-class people with whom she had nothing in common. Her own friends were drawn from a different social stratum, and the narrowness of the Awakened Israelites had long been irksome to her.

  Arthur decided to go to the church hall and intercept her as she came out. Barratt would probably be detained in conversation after the meeting. He was a hearty fellow, ever eager to be genial to any of the congregation. Arthur disliked that kind of heartiness. There was always a hint of superiority about it, which he thought uncalled-for in a person of Barratt’s humble extraction. If Helen came out of the hall first, her uncle meant to pick her up and drive her home without waiting for her husband. As Barratt had no car, he would have to walk, and Arthur could count on a few minutes uninterrupted talk with Helen before they were disturbed.

  He stopped his car by the pavement and got out, so as to be able to pounce on his niece as soon as she appeared. He had timed his arrival neatly, for the meeting broke up almost as he reached the hall door. He passed on, glancing up at the façade of the hall and reflecting sourly that most of the money spent on the building had been subscribed by his mother, who was one of the few rich members of the congregation. His thin lips tightened involuntarily at this disagreeable recollection. They had done their best to dissuade her—himself, his brother Edward, and even Helen—but the stubborn old woman took her own line and handed over the cash. “So much less for us eventually,” Arthur reflected angrily. He passed on, and then turned back to keep an eye on the emerging stream of people. As he did so, he almost collided with a tall, gaunt man who had just come down the steps.

  “Sorry, Kerrison!” Arthur apologised.

  “No matter, no matter,” Kerrison assured him ungraciously and then paused as though he intended to fall into conversation.

  Like old Mrs. Alvington, Stephen Kerrison was a strong supporter of the Church of Awakened Israel; and, unlike Arthur, he took his religion seriously so far as church meetings were concerned. Arthur, who had a good figure and prided himself on being a man of the world, looked on Kerrison with a sort of compassionate contempt. Kerrison was ungainly, short-bodied and long-legged, with big splay feet which seemed incapable of haste. He was seldom well-shaven; his tie was usually crooked; and he invariably carried an umbrella which he used as a walking-stick to help himself along. Unmarried at fifty, he lived at the apron-strings of a mother whom he adored and who adored him in return. Of all his lineaments, his eyes were the most striking: dark, deep-sunken, surrounded by black rings and burning with a fanatical fire.

  “You weren’t at the meeting?” he asked, in a tone which carried both criticism and reproach.

  Arthur Alvington shook his head impatiently.

  “I’ve just come to have a word or two with my niece—on business,” he explained curtly, intending to make it clear to Kerrison that he was not wanted.

  “Mrs. Barratt?” said Kerrison with a touch of acidity in his tone. “Yes, she was at the meeting. She doesn’t come often, nowadays. It seems rather a pity. She used to take such an interest in church affairs, and sh
e might do so much good among the younger people, if she chose.”

  “She has her own friends,” Arthur retorted sharply.

  Kerrison had no right to criticise his niece, he felt; and if the fellow talked like this to him, one could be sure that he said harsher things to other people. No wonder that Helen had lost interest in church affairs, if this sort of nagging was the kind of thing she had to suffer. Kerrison was a nice person to set up as a critic, with two slander actions to his discredit. Lucky that some people had made him pay for his loose tongue.

  At that moment, Helen Barratt emerged from the door of the hall and Arthur, with a nod of farewell to Kerrison, stepped forward to attract her attention. Arthur had an eye for a good-looking woman, and he glanced at his niece with æsthetic approval. She had worn remarkably well, he reflected. Though she was actually thirty-five, no stranger would take her for more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. She had lost girlishness without falling into matronliness. Arthur liked to see a woman with a straight back and her chin well up. “Still enough there to make a man turn and look after her in the street,” was his crude but contented conclusion. “No children, of course. That may have helped her to keep that slim figure.” She dressed well, too. Not expensively, of course, because Barratt’s miserable salary would not run to that; but even if the materials were cheapish, her taste made them look well enough. She came towards him, light-stepping, with a smile of recognition.

  “Well, uncle, I’m sorry I put you to the trouble of coming to meet me. I wanted to stay at home to-night, but John insisted on my going to that meeting, and he got so disagreeable over it that it was cheaper to let him have his way.”

  “Yes, it gave him a chance of annoying me,” said Arthur. “I expected something of the sort when he answered the phone. He seems to dislike me, I can’t think why. Is he busy inside there?” he ended, with a nod towards the door of the hall.